Cardboard City
by Mohamad Said Bazzi
(1995)
I.
For years I sprinted to find the other wall in the infiniteness of my confinement
In its darkness I could not sense shadow figures that persisted to surround me
Like groves of trees
Those were the standing shoulders of my ancients
Once wandering desert Bedouins
For years I sprinted to fall on the other wall
In the infiniteness of my confinement
II.
I stood in your eyes
Fields of lilacs
Their flesh wall permeable like dark gates into caves
I’ve Journeyed to their other side since a time unremembered
Since a time unremembered
The skull of my head had been open from above
Vulnerable
To the wind and to your voice
Its delicateness caused pepper tears to swell in me and descend
Spilling as the stars of a solemn night
Smelling like the sweet scratchings of green walnut twigs
My arms pulled down
Embedded into the asphalt of my confinement
Their branching roots stretching under
To follow my running like a trail of connected regret
III.
It is all I know
This it is
My city from whom I scream
My city wherein I run
Her grey walls taste of bitter history like my tongue
I breathe within me jasmine breaths
Chants that hover to her breast
She hears then my objections
But proceeds to scratch me then lick me face to foot
These are the shrieks of a runaway slave
Whose hair is the traintracks on which the wretched travel
Whose heart is the simple orange they peel
Whose fingers of dirt they suckle
For fragments of taste in their lives
I’ve slept in the belly of the gorge of the city
My lashes are her forests of grey weary men
My raw hide is her asphalt
Stretched out like a dead field
My eyes shatter their brown
In the dispersing of moths to her street lamps
In the pulp of their hour
Brothers spear for each other’s faces
With identical battle cries
IV.
These nights
I am a kingdom of charred plastic children
That lay in the streets disregarded
These nights I abandon for you my words
Juicy red petals
In the rubble of puddles
These nights
My heart is untame in my breast
Lusting to learn love
My fear is for my poor heart
That it may grow rusty grass on its side
If left neglected
That my heart’s fingers are left to decay
To flake like demolitions
I have never ignored the faint shrills of the dead in the night
Them I do not comprehend
Listen only for the blue and green in their music
In my meaningless strolls these nights
The heavy Earth feels painful when I step on her
Soil and stone ruins collapse onto each other in her circular motion
In a perpetual longing for the surface of a lonely moon
These nights
I no longer know the taste of hope
Souls burn with a lust for sorrow
Tragic is my fleeing that runs to die in the beautiful Earth
Under lightning dagger stabs that permit no rest
Love becomes a slowly learned betrayal
V.
Mere assassinings
Your simple drizzles
My love left squandered
Weeping blood into mud
The thirsty cardboard of our lungs
Scraping between the distant exhaustion of us both
Longing in the prolonged sorrows that are born in these nights
Longing for the voice that persuades away the tension of clasped hands
Longing for the eyes that widen to gaze at the lover approaching
Who shall command my own eyes
Who shall pluck the lilies of my teeth beneath the watchful moon
When all other Earths have failed me
I plant my shadows between the evening rocks and your sad freckles
I sleep in the lost capacity of your skin